Ghost of '86 failure haunts bid for immigration reform

1 hour, 10 minutes ago



Hovering over the Senate immigration debate like a malignant ghost is the near total failure of the last attempt to bring immigration under control — a train wreck of a plan passed in 1986. Then as now, the heart of the plan was a legalization-for-enforcement trade-off. Roughly 3 million illegal immigrants were offered legal status in exchange for supposedly tough new enforcement procedures to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants.


It was a sham. The measure set up a system in which employers had to accept virtually any document a job applicant produced to prove his or her legality. The inevitable byproduct was a booming industry in phony documents — and 12 million more illegal immigrants.


Now, 21 years later, legislators are being asked to make roughly the same deal: Give those 12 million undocumented immigrants probationary legal status and a path to permanent residency and citizenship. In exchange, tough new enforcement procedures will sharply cut the flow of future illegal immigrants. To skeptics, it's Groundhog Day.


Except that it's not.


The new enforcement plan is not yet convincing and must be improved. But it is built on a credible foundation.


On the border, hundreds of miles of fence are already being built, cameras and sensors installed, and the Border Patrol is adding thousands more agents. All are steps long demanded by immigration opponents, and all will be extended.


But fences and border agents won't keep undocumented workers out if the magnet of appealing jobs constantly lures them in. Reformers joke, grimly, that the nation is sending immigrants opposing messages: There's a "Keep Out" sign at the border, but 20 feet in there's a "Help Wanted" sign.


That makes the most important piece of any enforcement regime what it does in the workplace, where more than 7 million employers have to decide every day whether job applicants are legal or not. This is where the 1986 bill most notoriously failed, and where the 2007 bill is more promising — if the promise can be realized. That's a big if.


The bill is very ambitious.


Any legal worker would be expected to have an ID that was difficult or impossible to forge, preferably with a photo or biometric ID that would prove indisputably that the person holding the card was the person on the card. That is essential, but it is a huge hurdle. For reasons unrelated to immigration, any national ID card is intensely controversial. At least six states have already rejected a plan to make driver's licenses a de facto national ID. The debate won't disappear quickly.


To further solidify the card's credibility, employers would have quick access to one or more government databases to check, for example, that a job applicant's Social Security number matched his or her name. The government's existing "Basic Pilot" program does that now, but only for the tiny fraction of the nation's employers that voluntarily participate. Penalties for repeat violations would be massive — as much as $75,000 for each illegal worker.


Again, a good idea. It might not reach every illegal immigrant working as a nanny or gardener, but if fully operational and aggressively enforced, it could close off millions of jobs at companies large and small. That would be a resounding success.


But the bill's proponents appear wildly optimistic about their ability to field such a complex system quickly. They give themselves just 18 months. By comparison, we just wrote in this space Thursday about the failure of a much smaller plan, simply requiring passports for people returning from nearby countries. That had to be delayed despite a three-year run up.


Given the difficulties and the '86 experience, the temptation is to say that the new bill's most controversial provision — offering legalized status to many of the 12 million immigrants now here illegally — should not kick in until the program is fully functional. But that makes the enforcement job exponentially harder. If the focus instead is on new arrivals, chances of success are much greater.


That would have a domino effect. If new immigration were sharply curtailed, the law would regain its lost credibility, deterring others and restoring faith in the system. Those already here could then easily be assimilated — provided they followed the bill's tough strictures, which include fines, payment of back taxes and no serious criminal record during a rigorous 13-year path to citizenship. In any case, trying to toss out millions of hard-working people and breaking up families whose children are U.S. citizens would be heartless, needless, exceedingly expensive and ultimately futile.


But all of that depends on having an enforcement system that will work.


One huge obstacle is money, and senators have taken an important step by adding $4.4 billion in upfront funding to the bill.


The other obstacles are will and competence. Congress can ensure that this works by writing tough accountability provisions into the bill, approving the ID cards, and following through with sustained oversight.

Critics of the bill talk as if Congress is powerless. They're running from the ghost their predecessors created in 1986. There's no reason they can't write a bill that won't haunt their successors 20 years from now.

This is the fifth in an occasional series of editorials about this year's immigration debate. View the previous editorials at blogs.usatoday.com/oped/immigration_editorial.

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